The Industrial Kitchen Complex

It isn’t surprising, given the superpower ambitions and imperatives of the last century, that many of the great technological kitchen leaps were the inadvertent results of research at the industries and agencies that helped us win the Second World War, not to mention our Cold War/star wars with the Soviets. (One exception is the refrigerator; the application of thermodynamic research to refrigeration also took place in Europe with, among others, Albert Einstein, who patented his own fridge in 1930. Another is the gas oven; the first safe and successfully enclosed ovens came from Britain.) NASA scientists developed the technology for freeze-dried food—like ice, smoke, and salt, a milestone in the history of preservation. And we owe the microwave oven to Percy Spencer, the engineer who helped develop the Navy’s radar system, and the Cuisinart to Carl Sontheimer, the engineer who invented a microwave direction finder for the Apollo moon mission.